I've also seen a large uptick in the number of them (~1/week vs 0 before), and they're not political, they're mostly scammers pretending to know me. I haven't played along enough yet to learn what they're after, but they're from all kinds of US area codes in places I've never lived.

For me, real scam texts—mostly bank and Amazon order phishing. I get the political ones too but wasn't even counting them.

(Not OP) I get about one spam text a day and it's always some vaguely sexual message with a shortened link in it.

I don't answer my phone, but I've been getting these texts too recently.